The Pigeons on the Thames, a Dr Hagenstein Story

Pigeons are hard to draw, they move around a lot, reflected Dr Hagenstein as he leaned back thoughtfully on the park bench or whatever they call them in England, land of Shakespeare and relentless cultural decline. His taut muscles rippled like steel cables as he scratched his beard and looked around for enemy agents while his diminutive partners fed the pigeons crumbs of organic hand molted bread that seemed to be the only food he would be consuming on this mission thanks to the machinations of his enemy from the White Ward. Unbeknownst to the others, Dr Hagenstein, utilizing his vast knowledge of chemical and nuclear reactions, had installed tiny microbot particulates in the crumbs, which would activate in the pigeons' digestive tract and transmit live video feed from the pigeon's ocular nerve to an incredibly tiny flat screen TV monitor disguised as a bookmark in Dr Hagenstein's copy of Rick Steves Does England Again, a limited edition in which Agent Steves had hidden all sorts of secret messages for fellow agents to decipher.  Most of the secret messages involved hiking around charming English landscape like the Cotswolds and taking in the greenery and placid English sheep and staying at unbelievably picturesque B&Bs, but their mission itinerary would be taking them up the other side of the country, and the only chance he had of seeing any Cotswolds scenery would be through the tiny eyes of these idiotic birds, once his microbots had taken over their grain of sand sized brains and ceded total control of their musculoskeletal systems to the incredibly intricate joystick installed in his lower left second molar. Through this device he could make the pigeon do whatever he wanted by subtle maneuvers of his jawbone. 

A treacherous ambush, in the form of a tasteless organic cookie shoved with cunning swiftness in his famished mouth, malevolently timed at the moment the Alpha pigeon succumbed to microbot control and Dr Hagenstein's molar controller activated, completely undid this operation in the spate of a few seconds of unbelievably energetic and fatally reckless pigeon hops, forcing Dr Hagenstein to perform the embarrassingly exaggerated disconnect motions with his index finger, while the startled and grieving pigeon pack chose a new Alpha. 

The enemy agent from the White Ward had struck again!  Dr Hagenstein gagged on organic cookie and spluttered with rage simultaneously, an indescribably difficult physical feat achievable by only a select few super agents heavily trained by an unnamed master of ancient and uncomfortable physical motions who accepted no pay and spoke inscrutably all the time and lived in a secret monastery on a secluded hilltop in a dense wood on the border of Wyoming and Idaho.

Continuing Adventures of Dr Hagenstein in Olde England

Continuing Adventures of Dr Hagenstein in Olde England

I suppose last week's cliffhanger may have upset a few readers who couldn't tell what happened from the picture or the text, so let me reassure everyone that of course Dr Hagenstein got out of that sticky situation, whatever it was. 

Speaking of sticky situations, this week's depicted episode takes place in Covent garden, taking a dinner in a very fancy restaurant with Germanic wait staff and French hostess who forgot half of Dr Hagenstein's order as he cased the place for assassins and snipers and noticed his miniature partner had been administered a narcotic of some time and had fallen asleep in her plate, getting the uneaten portion of her lunch all over her face. Who had done it?  Dr Hagenstein pulls out his hand held rocket launcher which is disguised as a pen and pretends to draw a picture with it while actually preparing to use it on a mysterious chick who suddenly lunges across his table and seizes the butter knife like she knows exactly how to use it. It's the woman from the plane! The enemy agent who attempted to kill him by hassling him over one little drink and expected him to sit sober through an eleven hour flight!  Not this time, Dr Hagenstein laughs and makes a quip and then orders a beer to piss her off without even needing to fire the rocket launcher. His miniature partner sleeps through all the excitement like one of those beloved characters who keep needing Harrison Ford's help to get away from the nazis. The French hostess never brings the rolls or the dessert and Dr Hagenstein suspects her of being in pay of the White Ward or maybe the enemy agent iced her with the butter knife to shut her up, but if so she certainly seems legitimately upset about the dessert. 

Dr Hagenstein; Ye Olde Very British Christmas Sanction

Dr Hagenstein; Ye Olde Very British Christmas 

Sanction

Today's post is part 1 of a blog series, a sort of online graphic novel, which I've created in order to tell the story of our recent trip to the U.K. in a somewhat novel fashion, by not telling the story of our trip at all, because it wouldn't be that interesting, and by telling instead the story of a master superhero on a secret mission to the U.K., and using the graphics I created for our trip to make a cool graphic novel and thereby entertaining the reader without telling all about private family activities that are none of their business anyway. 

The master superhero's name is Doctor Hagenstein. He's a medical doctor who's been outlawed by the AMA because he breaks the rules in very cool ways and is not above icing a scumbag criminal who has it coming and has strange specimens in his secret basement laboratory. He is a member of the Orange  Ward, one of the hidden wards in the Mormon church that'a part of a transhumanist group within the church that believes that if humans want to live forever and become gods their going to have to do it themselves because god doesn't help lazy people. So the bishop of the Orange Ward looks like James Earl Jones and has super mental powers and he assigns Dr Hagenstein on secret missions all the time, like this one to the U.K., where he warns the Doctor that their enemies the White Ward might send an agent to mess up his mission and try to ice him. 

So this week's picture depicts scene 1 of the graphic novel, where the doctor is chilling on the plane with his favorite drink, a gin and tonic, and notices this woman with the eye covers pulled up on her forehead across the aisle from him on the plane, acting suspiciously. The doctor has developed total recall mind techniques, and he can rewind a scene in his head to catch interesting details, and when he rewinds a little he notices that when she had the eye covers over her eyes, and appeared to be sleeping earlier, that she had been turned toward him, so that if she didn't have eye covers she would have staring at him the whole time. Almost as if those weren't normal eye covers, but were actually secret superglasses with magnifying lenses, and she was an enemy agent monitoring his activities and was watching to see how much money the doctor was spending on drinks during the flight!  And it was a nine hour flight for criminey sakes

Security monitor

Security monitor

I feel that I've finally returned to my roots with this week's graphic, at least I've returned to a major branch, back to the heady time of my mid-life crisis, when I was in the full bloom of hypochondriac health, energetic enough to feel relentless anxiety, worrying that I might end up as what I eventually ended up as. I had some sleepless nights let me tell you, pondering weighty questions that I now find completely uninteresting. 

Back in the days when I would spend a lot of time furtively drawing strangers in public places, existing on as much adrenaline as I hope to ever experience, I would have refused to post a drawing this bad, or I would have felt compelled to apologize for the shaky pen strokes and lazy execution and unrecognizable shapes. I had some pride in those days, some standards, but I drew this picture merely to re-live the excitement of secrecy, to feel alive with the possibility that the strangers would notice me drawing them, the terrifying chance that they would approach me and ask to see the drawing, then go glassy eyed and overpolite with disappointment when they saw the pathetic little scrawl that I'd reduced them to.  I had a few moments of this fantasy, then noticed the security camera monitor, displaying my hunched back and crouching shoulders, and the sketchbook in my lap, prominently displayed to the bald man, who seemed to have no interest and no recognition that I was drawing his group at all. Or maybe he could see the picture I was drawing and had already passed through all the stages of realization and disappointment already. I could barely continue the picture after seeing the monitor. I felt that I should have drawn the image of myself in it, and that I'd missed the only meaningful picture that I would get to draw today, and felt a slight glimmer of my old anxiety.  A part of me hoped the restless anxiety and obsessive preoccupation will keep me up tonight, but the other parts of me will drag that part to sleep with the rest of us. 

Smart paper

No picture this week, or rather, a word picture, a design of a picture, a master plan for the ultimate picture. Picture in your mind a graphic novel that is all one picture, that is a huge map folded up like a pop up book origami that you have to unfold to decipher the incredibly complicated story of myself inventing a time machine and going back in time to meet Winston Churchill to help him beat the nazis, except that I'll offer to help him beat the nazis before the war even starts, before they kill anyone. How will I accomplish that? He'll ask. We'll be sitting in a secret English office with a couple of his closest advisers, this office will actually be in that huge house from Downtown abbey, and we'll be eating scones and tea in the earl's library after the prime minister's afternoon nap, and looking out at that huge fantastic lawn with all the intricately trimmed shrubbery. I'll tell Churchill that I'm an inventor who has invented a time machine and a lot of secret weapons and I want to take him back to World War I to kill hitler and help England win the war before they lost millions of soldiers because even though they eventually won anyway they used up a whole generation in senseless trench warfare and had to give up their world empire after WWII. He is astonished to hear about the world empire so I tell him I read all about it and that England experienced a decline due to socialism and I tell him about Harry Potter and he's depressed and about ready to surrender to the Nazis, and he weeps and calls me a dirty liar and spills my teacup on purpose I'm pretty sure so I demonstrate my futuristic technology to him, showing him that my incredibly posh James Bond suit that he told me was cool when we met and wanted one for himself but now I rip a sleeve and show him it's made of paper. You wore a paper suit in England? He says. Are you insane?  Then I demonstrate that my foot is also made of paper by taking it off and folding it into a paper airplane and sending it flying across the earl's library. He is speechless, and I explain that I can only travel in time by sending my consciousness back to occupy a body made entirely of smartpaper, which I invented when I realized that whenever I told anyone my fantastic ideas that they said it would only work on paper and I thought they were being negative but really they were giving me practical advice, so I invented smart paper which you can make anything out of and sent my consciousness back in time. I tell him that I want to take his consciousness back in time to the Dardanelles in 1915, where he will animate a paper Winston Churchill and advise himself in 1915 how to defeat the Turks and the Germans just like he wrote about in his famous books and he asks me about these and I tell him that after every political failure he wrote all these books demonstrating how right he was about everything that nobody else in the government agreed with and made them all go down in history as fools and cowards while he looked good and he got the nobel prize and lived to almost a hundred rich as a king. He thinks about this and says he can't decide which path to take and kicks me out of his office and I go to Austria in 1911 and show hitler comic books and he writes the first graphic novel ever about the Jews and how much he hates Vienna and how wrong everyone but him is and he establishes comic cons everywhere and dies rich at the age of a hundred and beloved by the world. At the end of the graphic novel after you fold out the last hidden corner of the origami you see a secret code that you can use to make your own time machine

The Naked Grid

The Naked Grid

I have chosen to include this piece online, to "publish" it, as the blog app so ingenuously describes it, as self therapy, to expose the failure of my artistic endeavors to the world, and position myself to embrace my reality in a healthy way, without the drugs this time. 

I am naked in this picture. Spiritually naked of course, I would never inflict a physically naked picture of myself on the world, unless I decided to blackmail my family. 

This picture actually exposes self delusion on many levels. First, the viewer finds their eyes drawn to the sloppy grid lines on the book, as the human is drawn to complexity and darkness. But at that point, when they attempt to evaluate the grid lines, they experience a visual revulsion, as their vision recoils from the unpleasantly unaesthetic messiness of the grid lines on the book. Why? They cry out, brows furrowed, body tensed. Why did he do that? And then they take in the pen-holding hand, which at first glance, to the unpracticed viewer seems to look somewhat handlike. They see the level of detail, all the wrinkles in the knuckles, the arrangement of the knuckles, and they realize that this is the only part of the picture actually drawn from life, and that it probably took the "artist" more time to draw this hand than it took him to draw the rest of the picture - even the terrible grid lines on the book. And they look closer and start to see some strange things about this hand. The thumb appears to be completely flat, as if the "woman" in the picture has a paper prosthetic. And the pinky appears to be missing some definition, and the hand might be holding a small baseball where the artist may have intended to depict a palm or something. And then the real problems begin, as the viewer tries to figure out which arm the hand is attached to. The orientation of the hand seems to indicate a very short arm coming from begin the book, but the rudimentary elbow on the other side, attached to a line that might be a shoulder and humerus, suggests a separate route, an arm with a second elbow?  The viewer looks carefully and finally, unwillingly, at the unfinished book, and sees lines that are without a doubt attached to the hand. Is this the missing second arm?  Could it be that the artist has placed a book here to cover this arm? The arm certainly looks to need something, either cover or maybe with a little more effort, repair. Perhaps the artist should use erase able pencils to begin their future pieces, just for the hard stuff, like arms. But maybe the artist tells himself that pens are more honest and immediate, that he's creating something beyond just a perfect mundane illustration, something evocative and meta...ha ha, the viewer laughs and laughs. Honest! Meta! Really? What else does he tell himself? 

Failure Releases us to Dream II

Failure Releases us to Dream II

Why would I give this picture of a smiling old man such a title?  Think of this man, this IT guy, sitting at his cubicle in the basement office as he has sat in many cubicles in many basement offices, for many years, decades. Outside, the sun shines, but here in his ancient space he is in darkness. Why does he smile?  Once he was a young IT guy, healthy and strongly odiferous, full of life, playing dungeon quest at his workstation and repeatedly advising many a computer illiterate prole from the upstairs offices to reboot, reboot, reboot. He joined many dungeon gaming groups and attended many pc hobbyist conventions, and at one of these he encountered his enemy; a tall, good looking, glib and uninspired programmer, a mediocre engineer with a gift for working people, and a mean tendency for sarcasm, everything the IT guy was not. This man mocks him at meetings, mocked his homemade computer in front of his fellow hobbyists, manages to pass himself off as the bigger expert, with his fellow pc hobbyists, fooling them all with his charm. Back then the IT guy smiled and laughed inwardly, mentally preparing himself for a revenge of waiting, of patient forbearance, awaiting the inevitable end to such stories; the parvenu crashes and burns, his walk can't match his talk, he is exposed for his lack of deep knowledge, for the slenderness of his understanding, and they will meet again, at an electronics shop perhaps, where the parvenu works as a salesman, and the IT guy is a famous hacker, regarded with awe at the conventions for his deep understanding of software engineering, of robotics, of Artificial Intelligence. The parvenu cannot meet his eyes, he is embarrassed, hoping the IT guy won't remember his earlier remarks...This vision has sustained him through many years of cubicles in basements, even after it became apparent that the parvenu, now quite rich and well known, would not ever be working in an electronics shop. But the IT guy has held out hope for the basic idea of their reunion in his mind, taking care to never apply for work with the company the parvenu owns, warming himself with the talk of his friends at hobbyist meetings nowadays, who laugh and remember the parvenu back then, and reflect on the sad ignorance of the public and the lies behind all idols. But today he has seen a news item, of a celebrity death. He links, gripped by a compulsion, to the obituary, and reads; "Steven Jobs, Inventor..." the phrase works through his mind, there in the darkness, with the queasy blue light from the monitors playing upon his unkempt beard, and the smell from the young IT guy in the next cubicle beating powerfully into his nostrils, and he decides that this day, today, will be his last day working in this basement. At the moment of this picture, that thought has filled him with an ecstatic joy. He will go now and drive away, into the sunlit mountains, and he will not return.